Whole new world: NASA's new view of our sunlit Earth
Digital Reporter
Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 10:32 AM - Earthlings, we like where we live, and we like taking a long, lingering look at the wonders of our cosmic abode.
The lucky elite that can cut it as an astronaut or cosmonaut have the privilege of viewing it with their own eyes. For the rest of us, there's NASA, and they've just added a new tool for us to use.
Every day, the space agency will post a dozen or more colour shots of the planet, taken from the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC). That's one of the instruments aboard the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), a satellite that orbits the Earth at a point that keeps it between the Earth and the sun, some 1.6 million kilometres away.
Aside from the eye candy, the satellite plays a vital role in monitoring changes in Earth's vegetation, ozone, aerosols, clouds and other key indicators that let us know how our climate it doing.
You can check out that site here, but you don't need to make that your only stop. NASA has plenty of other tools for monitoring our Earth.
Our favourite is NASA Worldview (find your home province, change the date on the slider below and prepare to get lost), but NASA's Earth Observatory is a gold mine of individual shots of our planet, along with explanations putting them into context.
SOURCES: NASA
WATCH BELOW: A massive hole in the sun
